Addressable TV puts audience data and insight at the center of buyer and seller strategies, helping them to better target the people most likely to resonate with ad spots on both linear TV and, increasingly, OTT platforms. That’s helped inform smarter buys and has led to more transparency into how ads are performing and the metrics they’re driving. That’s made for good business. But too much of a good thing can turn sour.
In conversation with Furious Corp. founder and CEO Ashley Swartz at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media, the agency’s evp and co-chief investment officer David Campanelli said that the top of the funnel still matters. Relying too much on data can leave a portion of potential customers off the table.
“As we get more specific and more addressable in media, do we lose that reach aspect, particularly in linear TV? What [linear TV] does well is reach massive amounts of people at one time with a 30-second ad,” Campanelli told Swartz. “Going too far down the addressable road, you’ll miss segments of the population that are potential consumers. There is still a role for that.”
The key, Campanelli says, is finding a way to make decisions using both traditional metrics, like Nielsen, and advanced TV metrics that paint more specific portraits of the customer. The more those two sides of the customer data coin – which incorporate top-to-bottom of the funnel reach – can merge, the more value that will be created, he argues.
And of course, as the top metric for Horizon Media is to drive business outcomes for clients, the value of the media buy has to match up for premium prices. As more agencies, including Horizon Media, build out their own data systems, the price of services increase. The investment has to be worth it, but Campanelli says the shift in emphasis from third- to first-party data is only going to continue.
“What we’re learning more and more is first-party data – good, valuable first-party data – is the holy grail, the way to go,” says Campanelli. “Third-party data is not as accurate as we had hoped. Leaning more into first-party matches and developing our own Horizon data practice and platform to match that and push that out to vendors is where we think it’s going in the future.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
